Predictable tactics in the war on terror

Michelle Griffin

Damian Lewis has been a shining light as Nicholas Brody in the relatively disappointing second series of Homeland, which concludes Sunday.

Show of the week Homeland: season finale Sunday, Channel Ten, 8.30pm

FACE it, Homelanders, we've been hate-watching our once-favourite show for several episodes. Every espionage thriller starts better than it ends, but the real victim in this second series is suspense, which was hijacked by stupidity long before Abu Nazir made like a metaphor and locked Carrie in a conveniently abandoned dungeon/warehouse.

The penultimate episode's gravest error was not bamboozling the viewers, but boring them with tired routines. The bit where Carrie charges into danger; the one where Brody and Jess talk sadly; the moment where Dana sulks. Even the scene where the arch-enemy is killed was anticlimactic. Sunday's finale desperately needs to shock us to keep us around for season three.

Homeland was never a realistic show; it wasn't The Wire with better surveillance. It's a high-concept thriller. The first four episodes of this season were electrifying, shriek-aloud television. Like Carrie on a mission, the show swiftly went rogue on TV's standard tropes, revealing within two episodes the treachery Brody hid all of season one. By episode four, Carrie had blown the operation wide-open in a coruscating face-off of fear and scorn.

For this, we could forgive some bizarre plot swerves. Nazir's shadowy network, so plausibly clandestine in season one, is maddeningly inconsistent. In one episode, they make Brody - now a congressman - play chauffeur. In another, they have their own US-based militia. At least the tailor's murder was a rare display of black humour, as Brody answered his mobile phone mid-deed. The helicopter abduction, however, was an audience-baiting display of deus ex machina.

Vestiges of realism still cling to the script, especially in Saul Berenson's (Mandy Patinkin) enjoyable dialogue (polygraph operator: ''Are you sometimes called the Bear?'' Saul: ''F---ing hope not!''). Many other performances are still great, notably Morgan Saylor as Dana, TV's most believable surly teen, and Rupert Friend as Quinn, a broodingly hot CIA assassin.

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The two leads have done terrific work in trying circumstances. Claire Danes' ''cry face'' is justly celebrated but her smile in episode one as she escapes from danger in Beirut is magnificent.

The season belongs, however, to Damian Lewis as Nicholas Brody, delivering even when the concept is preposterous. His special talent is playing a good liar, so there's doubt even, or especially, when he sounds most sincere. His moment of truth is the primal scream when his wife demands he tell the CIA to back off: ''I can't! I can't! I can't!''

Listen, the fans are not angry because the show isn't realistic. (Though it was funny when the show's soapiest bed-hopping was echoed in the news by the complexities of the Petraeus affair.) Viewers lose faith when a show breaks its own rules.

The first season worked because we stayed in the cat-and-mouse world of surveillance, of the unhinged watching the unreliable.

This time around, psychological drivers such as Carrie's mania, or her patriotism, are used or jettisoned as scenes demand. Brody's religious beliefs are erratically employed. Dana's hit-and-run is just an exhausted B plot. But chiefly, Abu Nazir's endgame makes no sense. If his arch-enemy dies and everyone thinks it was natural causes, what good is that to a terrorist? And why is basic tech, such as Skype and SMS, so untraceable?

The first series of Homeland was more subtle about terrorism's impulses than anyone expected from an American drama. Nazir's mob were always the bad guys, but their motives were persuasively explored. Now he and his shadowy brigands are just cartoons, right down to the scene where the evil mastermind explains his fiendish plot to the captive damsel.

We've been led right back to propaganda about being alert not alarmed, for the terrorist hates freedom and strikes randomly. Flags fly; soldiers lock and load; America is saved again. The show that was meant to be the antidote to 24 has turned into another foreigner-baiting, torture-glorifying tale. Perhaps, like a sleeper cell, this was its purpose all along.